Case Study: Academy of Art University achieves career-ready creative skills with Adobe Photoshop

Academy of Art University prepares students for successful careers in creative disciplines with Adobe solutions

Academy of Art University, a San Francisco art school of about 13,000 students, needed to prepare graduates for creative careers by giving everyone access to professional, up-to-date software, standardizing tools across courses, centralizing learning assets, and speeding HR paperwork. To address these challenges the university partnered with Adobe Photoshop (as part of Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe Experience Manager, and Adobe Sign) to bring industry-standard apps and cloud services into classrooms, labs, and mobile workflows.

Adobe Photoshop was delivered through an enterprise Creative Cloud ETLA alongside Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe Sign (integrated with Workday), giving every student, teacher, and staff member access on personal devices or 600 campus computers, consolidating legacy sites into a single marketing site, and enabling 45+ custom course components. The vendor’s solutions improved learning and creativity, ensured consistent templates and faster content creation, and streamlined HR—agreements are now generated and signed in minutes—producing measurable time savings and broader reach for the university.

Academy of Art University

Jason Shaeffer

Vice President of Online Education